It is a widely accepted standard of human rights that individuals who committed crimes before their 18th birthdays are not eligible for the death penalty.  This minimum standard has been around for years, and there are only a half-dozen countries that ignore it. 

The US is one.  The others are not exactly a "who’s who" of countries known for their respect of human rights.  

Pakistan, for example, has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is the most recent international agreement to clearly prohibit capital punishment for offenses committed by people under the age of 18.   Under Pakistani law, however, offenders as young as 13 can be executed for blasphemy, stealing, and various other crimes.  Younger children--all the way down to age 7--can be executed if they are deemed "mature" enough.  Depending on the crime, they can be put to death by stoning or hanging.

The only country in the world not to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the United States.  (Somalia has not ratified it, either, but they have no cohesive national government).  Still, even Americans who support capital punishment would agree that executing 7-year-olds is taking things too far. The word "barbaric" comes to mind.  But if we take a look at the death penalty in our own country today, we’ll see that we are standing on a very slippery slope.  

In the past 25 years, the United States has imposed over 170 death sentences on offenders who were 15, 16, or 17 years old at the time of the crimes. 1994 was the peak year, with 16 death sentences imposed on 16- and 17-year-olds.  Not surprisingly, more of these were in Texas than any other state.

One that year was in Oklahoma.

And Oklahoma has played an important role. A landmark case that went to the US Supreme Court in 1988 was Thompson v. Oklahoma, in which the state sought the go-ahead to execute 15-year-olds.  The justices refused, setting 16 as the minimum age for which the Court can stomach an execution.  State courts have subsequently blocked other attempts to execute offenders younger than 16 in Louisiana (1988 and again in 1993), Indiana (1989), and Alabama (1991).  Florida tried again in 1994, but their state Supreme Court halted that effort to execute 15-year-olds.

All these legal precedents aside, even today there seems to be an attitude of "try, try again" in various quarters.  This April, in reaction to the schoolyard shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the New York Times featured the opinion of Texan Jim Pitts.  This state lawmaker believes Texas should execute 11-year-olds.  (That state, incidentally, has put 41 juvenile offenders on death row, the most in the nation.)  Congress last year gave serious consideration to a bill that would have lowered the age for federal prisoners to be eligible for the death penalty from 18 to 16.  Similarly, California politicians--including the governor and others--have advocated lowering the minimum execution age from 18, as state law currently stipulates, to 13--like in Pakistan.  These prominent figures said that some children this age are already hopelessly hardened criminals with no possibility of rehabilitation, and therefore should be killed.

What is the rationale for sentencing juvenile offenders to death?  Some say it is needed because violent juvenile crime in America is out of control, worse than in any other country.  Juvenile homicides have been on the increase even as adult homicides are decreasing.  "Teen predators" seem to be particularly cold-hearted and brutal, and as a result, elected officials at every level across the nation are pushing for harsher punishments.  Blaming society is considered an ineffective alternative because the societal conditions which breed violent juvenile crime--poverty, child abuse, mental illness, etc.--seem insurmountable, and in the meantime, the violence continues.

Still, it is true that almost all teenage offenders have had difficult childhoods, and not by their own choosing. The US Supreme Court said as much in another Oklahoma case (Eddings v. Oklahoma, 1982).  "Youth crime as such is not the offender’s fault," the Court said, citing "a failure of family, school, and the social system, which share responsibility for the development of America’s youth." Further, executions, while politically expedient, are not a deterrent to crime. This is perhaps especially true for disturbed teenagers, who at that age tend to see themselves as immortal and are unlikely to weigh the consequences of a possible death sentence against their violent impulses.

It is morally unacceptable to allow a teenager--disturbed or otherwise--to act without behavioral limits.  How morally acceptable is it for us, though, as an adult-governed society, to seek retribution to the point of killing people for what they did when they were kids?  Some call this "justice."   Justice should be an attempt to make society safer and individuals better through constructive consequences for anti-social behavior, along with a commitment to prevention of its root causes.  Too often this true justice devolves into myopic revenge on behalf of crime victims, exploiting their families’ anger and grief.

We have more options than executions on the one hand and impunity on the other. Yet in a recent Oklahoma case, the prosecution refused a plea-bargain offer from the 16-year-old offender.  The DA insisted on seeking death, even though the defense was willing to plea guilty in exchange for an irrevocable life sentence without the possibility of parole: no appeals, no early release.  It defies reason.  Life without parole for a 16-year-old is not harsh enough?  This would make the DA soft on crime?  People would see it as ‘a slap on the wrist’?  Something is wrong with this picture.  There are other legal punishments besides the death penalty.

Oklahoma has imposed six juvenile death sentences in the past two decades, and has unsuccessfully sought it in several more such cases.  Thomas Loveless, who admitted to killing a girl when he was 16, was one.  The crime he confessed to was horrible and cruel.  I observed his trial, and there was a consensus that he must face serious consequences for his part in the kidnapping and murder of a 15-year-old classmate, Tiffany Tull, who by all accounts was delightful and good.  It was impossible not to share the exasperation and sorrow over her death that her family and community felt most intensely.  While I could not agree that we should kill Thomas Loveless for what he did, I realize many did feel that lethal injection is exactly what he should get. (In the end, he was sentenced to life without parole.)

What will we get, as a society, from writing off our troubled teens and putting them to death? A reduction in crime?  Greater justice?  A calmer, more mature population of youngsters?  Even if these were the outcomes, which is highly debatable, would it be worth the price of killing our ‘bad apples’? 

Most of the world has concluded that to sentence kids--even ruthless kids--to death is itself a crime.  So far, our hopes for a better society, which we all share, do not seem to have taken root in the context of America’s defiance of international standards.  Instead we find a peculiar streak of machismo in our culture; a damaging approach to support for victims that promotes festering rather than recovery; new generations of young people with few models for righting wrongs beyond revenge; and a political climate that encourages opportunists who call for more and quicker executions for younger and younger offenders. 

I think again of Pakistan.  This is, indeed, a slippery slope.

Author Kevin Acers is a social worker and human rights advocate based in Oklahoma City.  He is the former president of the Oklahoma City Chapter of Amnesty International and a past board member of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.